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A small programming note: In putting these letters together I think of them as falling into one of two categories. Some letters are meant to be about ideas larger than me and in the other category I let myself be myopic and process my feelings through writing without fishing for external punchlines. I try to alternate the two since I know some of you are not here for my rambles and feelings. I realize I have not done a great job with that lately. If you are that type of reader thank you for bearing with me – I’ve just had a lot going on recently and have needed this space to talk myself through it.
Content note: I use the word queer in this letter and there is one swear word towards the end
DIPOLE MOMENT*
Me and my brother must have seen my parents’ wedding video dozens of times. For a few years all four of us would periodically watch it the way you’d watch an overly loved movie – fast forwarding through some parts and lingering on others until every detail felt important. This wedding used to hold a prominent space in our family lore. It was a little punk-rock like my dad and a little free-spirited and chaotic like my mom. There were people banging on plates with their cutlery until the venue staff asked them to stop, politically edgy rock songs (it was the 90s in quickly dying communist Yugoslavia), a soccer chant, men doing the can-can and a relative singing with the band for so long and so well that everyone invited him to subsequent weddings in the hope he’d do it again. Aunts known for never smiling not only grinned for the camera but also danced and everyone talked to everyone. At my first Iron Maiden concert, sixteen years later, my dad will tell me that when I’m excited, I clap out of rhythm just like his father in law had on that day (and we have it on video). My favorite anecdote about my parent’s wedding comes from my mother’s mom, who for years claimed that she was so nervous that she couldn’t remember anything that happened before the soup was served at the reception. As a kid I was very confused by this because I didn’t like soup, but the story stuck with me; it felt like some truth about weddings was embedded within it. Maybe weddings are supposed to be so stressful that you lose memories. Maybe they’re supposed to be so magical that even the soup is supremely memorable.
The first summer my then boyfriend and I spent together was a whirlwind. We had dated for less than half a year when I first came to Brooklyn to meet his family, three months later we were in Croatia hanging out with mine, a few weeks later I passed my qualifying exam and a few days after that he moved back to the East Coast, following a research advisor to a new school while I stayed back in Illinois. We had spent the previous fall and most of the winter on chilly, snowy dates (highlights include seeing a local stoner metal band, a Manson family documentary, and mistakenly trying to find a DIY show in a post office), had one somewhat serious conversation to make sure we were on the same page around Valentine’s Day (in his old, kale-smoothie-stained kitchen) and then settled into laughing very loudly in bars with the same three friends every week then watching too many episodes of The X-Files in bed the next day. We made donuts and pizzas and vegetarian chili served in homemade cheesy buns. He learned to make Croatian style Turkish coffee and I started drinking gin and tonics. He introduced me to Sleep and Fuzz and I advocated for season one of Twin Peaks and Anna Torv’s cheekbones in Fringe. Visiting New York that summer was not my first trip there, but I was still taken by it, all of my sheep-in-a-big-city instincts heavily triggered. We’d ride the Q train home after long nights in dive-y bars and smoky patios as the sun rose over the Brooklyn Bridge. Reclining back on his extended arm, his presence always so warm and soft, just felt slightly unreal. One night we talked about our respective dream houses, fully acknowledging that neither of us actually had it in them to maintain anything beyond our two fairly modest graduate student apartments. He slipped up and used an ‘our’ or a ‘we’ instead of an “I” at some point, implying that I would be in the dream home in question, that we would share it. He caught it immediately and followed up with a very humble ‘I don’t mean to be presumptuous’ but I couldn’t ever forget it for the simple reason that that one pronoun shift was all I really wanted to hear that summer. There are lots of pictures of the two of us in Croatia a few months later, at least one from a soccer game, and I bet at least one where my mother’s mom is pushing second servings of soup onto us as well.
I figured out that I probably wasn’t straight sometime early in college when it became obvious that even though I had left the confines of a single sex school, my girl crushes were not subsiding. The thought had lingered somewhere on the edge of my consciousness for years – I had been a tomboy when I was very young, got interested in boys pretty late, cared for outfits and make up as if they were almost drag, and always felt strongly compelled to argue in favor of queer folks that were heavily marginalized while I was growing up in Croatia – but this felt like a concrete, almost scientific, conclusive test of the matter. Later, hanging out with college kids who confidently called themselves bisexual or pansexual** gave me permission and courage to think through claiming those words as well. A roommate – asexual, polyamorous and much more liberated than both me and the man I was dating at a time – tried to explain ‘queer’ to me over dinner once. They stressed that the concept is bigger than sex. It wasn’t just about who you wanted to date, it was about challenging norms and binaries, about re-writing the rules, about fighting power in the bedroom and outside of it. Save for one brief affair later in college, I continued to mostly date men and mostly crush on women. However, the idea of queerness as a challenge to what a relationship has to look like and how it has to be shaped by gender assigned to us at birth never quite left my mind. Having ownership and the power to ask questions about things sold to us as obvious when it comes to gender and sex became something I actively wanted to hold on to. Ultimately, it reflected my growing frustration with having to categorize both people and the way I felt about them. I shyly started to call myself queer even when fully committed to some or other straight man.
By the time I met my current partner I was comfortable saying it out loud, admitting that at my core I’m at least somewhat about fighting ‘the Man’ and making out with whoever I want to along the way. I have a slight problem with authority and a less slight problem with ideas such as ‘femininity’ which I am increasingly convinced don’t actually mean much beyond someone’s attempt to control someone else’s body. There is something utopian and futuristic to the idea of queerness. Scholars have argued that it is in many ways a concept we will never fully embody; it will always push us to re-examine who we are and what we give power to. (It is maybe not surprising that so many queer people are shapers of culture and innovators in all things creative. They have a source of what gets deemed as transgressive in who they are and have to find ways to share and express it.) Instead of calling myself bisexual or pansexual I settled on queer as a signifier for not caring about who anyone thinks I should or should not be attracted to. I made peace with the word in part because it implied an openness for my future, a sort of freedom to build relationships with whoever and however I want to. I spent half of my time in college very seriously dating a straight man who denounced gender roles in words but acted on every stereotype when it was just the two of us. We’d fight about everything that could possibly be gendered, from who deserves to be taken seriously as a feminist to my cooking and the way I folded towels and dried dishes. Later I realized that even the sex was actually quite bad, dulled by sticking to a power imbalance that permeated the rest of our interactions. The whole thing wore me out. I told myself that in graduate school I’d be brave and date more women, like I have wanted to before. I was apprehensive of falling in love with another man, even though we had the same haircut and both somehow managed to part it in the way opposite of what’s traditionally prescribed to our respective genders. I’m glad I did, and I’m glad this did not make me any more straight.
A month ago, a friend asked me what I imagined my perfect wedding would be like. Despite being a person who talks too much and overthinks everything, I had nothing to say. I was never a popular kid, never all that successful with dating anyone or leaving failed relationships unscathed, and my self-esteem had never been high enough to give me incentive for daydreaming about some grand ceremony. Growing up, I had also been fairly uninterested in the matter; even after I started noticing boys it was with more desire to take them to a heavy metal concert than the altar. I tried to say all of this to my friend, but in fewer words because it was a workday and I was awkwardly typing on my phone in between meetings and seminars, and they responded with a somewhat elated ‘do whatever you want then’. And so I chose to do what we had always done as a couple, ever since that first summer – wait until it’s almost the last minute then throw something together without many second thoughts and roll with it when the time comes. After all, this near chaotic approach has consistently worked for us for almost six years. I wore a white dress I had had made for an outrageously posh ceremony I couldn’t avoid all the way back in boarding school (it had to be white, floor length and unembellished), I changed my last name because I wanted us to share it, and we barely told anyone because neither of us really wanted it to be a big deal. At the Office of the City Clerk, we got a number and waited in line as if it was the DMV. The officiant mispronounced both of our names and we both managed to put the ring on the incorrect hand of the other. We took the subway to a fancy 39th floor penthouse Korean barbecue lunch but got there too early and ended up just hanging out with family at Herald Square for a while, sitting on metal chairs in our stiff clothes while New York whizzed by. There was soup but I think my mom, who completely surprised me by saying she’d come just a week earlier, remembers everything before and after. It felt really, really good. And when we started running into friends in the days afterwards, and they all agreed that this was a typical thing for us to have done, I had to admit to myself that I also felt a little proud.
Even though my parents separated by the time I graduated college, thinking back on their wedding video and the stories surrounding it now makes it really obvious how much of an influence they were on what I thought, or maybe still think, a couple and a marriage should be. Part of the story has always been that they threw the whole thing together quickly, and I have always suspected that some of my older relatives maybe did not want to see it coming. Part of the story is most certainly that they did their own thing, and everyone ended up having an unprecedentedly good time. I’ve understood from a young age that we were a slightly different kind of family, one with less reverence for norms. My late grandfather was nicknamed ‘separato’ by his work friends. The soccer team we root for has as its slogan that they are ‘soli contro tutti’. My dad routinely signs his messages to me with ‘LLHM’ or ‘long live heavy metal’ and in the past few years my mom’s number one advice has been to tell everyone to just ‘fuck off’. We have never been a particularly tame bunch, never all that much for traditions that do not serve us. Sometimes I wonder whether there is even a universe in which I could have grown up to be anything other than defiant and rebellious. I know my parents and I probably disagree on lots, gender politics included (I wonder whether this letter will get me in trouble along those lines), but though they did not have the language or the specifics, they most certainly gave me the courage to reject and question whatever does not serve me or harms me in some way. Their separation hurt me badly exactly because they seemed to be the only example I ever had of very different people just sort of rolling with the chaos together and making it despite skirting so many of the implied rules. I’m sure there were many things I did not see, or saw and forgot about. I know their problems were real. But I also know that the small and large rebellions they believed in were also real. They primed me to embrace what I would later identify as my queerness, gave me a tiny bit of starter courage to build my own norms for love and family.
Three days after the wedding, my husband and I were at a psychology lab happy hour in a Mexican bar in New Haven, crammed in a booth and drinking margaritas from glasses painfully lacking a salted rim. After the sole, slightly uncomfortable looking, faculty member left, the conversation shifted to how few people knew about our wedding plans. ‘You really caused an uproar in our department’ someone bluntly stated while my husband tried to argue that many of our friends and acquaintances knew we were about to get married ‘at least in the abstract’. Everyone agreed this was classic behavior for him. I nodded to myself, I would have expected something a little impulsive and a little DIY from him too. While I was listening to Iron Maiden and watching Tommy with my dad as a kid in Croatia, he was watching age inappropriate horror movies and hanging out with a metal musician older brother on the other side of the world. We have that crunchy defiant impulse within us in the same way. Maybe this is why we’ve never fought about anything having to do with gender, because it all seems like just too many rules. His maleness has never scared me because we’ve both been uninterested in letting it be key to figuring out who we are when put together. Walking to his home from the bar, we complained about the salt and laughed about the uproar. ‘I guess we flipped it’ he said, and I realized that everything we did on our wedding day had actually been perfect. I had to leave for Illinois really early the next day, braving myself for a day-long train-train-bus-plane-bus combination. In my half-anxious and half-sleepy state missed the chance to say something mushy and profound before embarking for my home as someone’s wife for the first time. Had I had it more together, though, what I would have said is that I’ve never been so happy about deciding what the future can be than now when there are two of us to ignore the rules. I have so much hope.
Best,
Karmela
(Photo by F. Callaghan)
* The most common example of a dipole is a bar magnet having a North and a South pole. Similarly, electric dipoles consist of a positive and a negative charge. The dipole moment in either case measures how far apart the two poles or the two charges are – one would expect them to annihilate but when they form a dipole they move as one object and the dipole moment is effectively its size. Quantities such as the energy of a dipole in an electromagnetic field depend on its dipole moment.
** There is a lot of discussion about these two words in the queer community, especially concerning how they relate to the way in which we think of gender now. While ‘bi’ in bisexual has often been deemed problematic for reinforcing a gender binary, some argue that it means ‘both same and different gender’ instead of ‘both genders’. Pansexual is a more expansive term and more inclusive of trans identities without any extra reading necessary. Ultimately both convey an attraction to people of more than one gender.
ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: In the recent weeks I have been either working on my thesis or frantically applying to jobs. I think I used to be the kind of person who planned on just stapling their papers together and calling that a thesis. Now that I actually have to think that plan through, I have realized that if I want my work to be any semblance of readable or pedagogical then I will have a whole lot of actual writing to do. Additionally, two of my mostly (but not quite) finished projects will each get their own chapter thus forcing me to really take stock of what I have learned through working on either. Without a doubt it is beneficial for me to be thinking about presenting my work in one clear narrative and I really want to produce a document that will surpass just satisfying a graduation requirement. I have learned, through writing some twenty odd pages so far, that this is a lofty goal and really hope to be able to focus on it even more in the coming weeks.
Since my last letter I went through various phases of feeling anxious about jobs and job applications. However, actually completing a few has given me a bit more confidence for tackling the long list of upcoming deadlines in this area. I have reached out to some interesting faculty about postdoctoral positions, applied to a few that are officially listed already and also applied to a few non-academic jobs editing physics journals and mentoring girls interested in STEM. I have always thought of the idea of getting a non-academic job as a secondary plan and a failsafe only, but after some soul searching and lots of scrolling through job boards I am warming up to the idea of reading papers for a living or trying to work for an outreach or a non-profit organization adjacent to the sciences in some capacity. Given that I wrote my first cover letter ever only a few weeks ago and that I have now tweaked three different versions of my resume, I wonder how realistic it is to even think of myself as competitive for any of these positions. At the same time, there’s not much I can lose by trying and it might be refreshing to try and talk my way into a job that doesn’t require phrases like ‘Gross-Pitaevskii formalism and the Thomas-Fermi approximation’. It is still quite early for me to even think about making any grand decisions, but I am trying to courageously explore all of my options and avoid an identity crisis while I do so as best as I can.
Finally, the week before our wedding, I attended a science communication workshop in College Park, organized by ComSciCon and the American Institute of Physics. While I have a lot of experience with diversity and inclusion advocacy, student organizing and mentoring, I have not done much of what could be considered to be traditional science outreach. Consequently, I was excited to hear some talks and panels on how to just talk to people about science. The workshop really provided on that front but also engaged the participants in much more. There were great conversations about diversity, inclusion, social media, policy and even communicating with professional societies such as the American Physical Society. Many of the talks were followed by interactive and hands-on sessions and all participants were asked to come with a pitch-able pop science article ready for peer and expert review. I have not gathered the courage to actually send my piece anywhere, but the reviews and tips were really helpful. I flew to the DC area a little early to spend a really nice evening with a friend before the workshop kicked off and really enjoyed revisiting our connection. Luckily, I left Maryland feeling like I had made some new connections as well, with many of the workshop participants quickly organizing ways to stay in touch. Overall, the whole thing was really worthwhile and enjoyable, and I hope I’ll get more chances to participate in science communications spaces in the future.
(I am also on the edge of being able to actually do a supported headstand. However, it would probably be more accurate to say that what I am really learning is how to fall with grace.)
LISTENING: I am getting around listening to some of the year’s new releases and finding that I like many. For instance, both the latest from Weeping Sores and the first from Vehemence are great records, rooted in something like black metal but going beyond it. I am in favor of the slight orchestral bent that occasionally shows up in the former and the medieval theme in the latter and enjoyed listening to both albums as something more conceptually coherent than just a collection of songs. Very excitingly, Cult of Luna also just released a new album, A Dawn to Fear, and having listened to it a few times both on Spotify and vinyl I am definitely not disappointed. This is not their best album (though I wonder whether I’ll ever like any of their material as much as I like Salvation and Vertikal) but it is solidly good and a course correction compared to the less safe yet more incoherent Mariner. I would like A Dawn to Fear more with a little more roughness, a bit more of a gritty quality that Vertikal had in particular, but I will also probably keep returning to it as it is loud, complex and slightly enveloping in that great way that so much of Cult on Luna’s music is. And as a complete departure from all the loudness, while I was in New York I thrifted a pretty beat up vinyl of Songs of Leonard Cohen and spent almost every Saturday mornings since listening to it. I have always had a soft spot for Cohen, even for some of his more recent, more corny work along the lines of Ten New Songs, but this record is simply full of classics and cannot really be argued with. There is something in me that rejoices in well phrased melancholy and Cohen excels in that.
I don’t have any particularly focused podcast recommendations for this letter and to some extent it feels appropriate to not tie our story (and my own) to someone else’s produced and edited narrative. However, as far as queer content goes both WNYC’s Nancy and Slate’s Outward are fairly good, with the first being more storytelling oriented and the second veering into politics more often. If you’re interested in revisiting difficult family memories, Gimlet’s Heavyweight is back for another season and traffics in that sort of content quite proficiently, as do Family Ghosts, albeit without a host with a personality so strong that it cannot be divorced from the show’s identity.
READING: When I last wrote about Asja Bakic’s Mars, I had read about a third of the book and was somewhat pleasantly intrigued by her blunt and mildly cryptic style. Having finished it, I am less intrigued and more exhausted by it. Towards the end of the book Bakic’s stories become more politically charged which makes the lack of clear points or punchlines harder to parse and stomach. There is merit to ambiguity and not always spelling everything out, but engaging a topic such as, for instance, immigration and then being vague about it just seems a bit reckless and unnecessary in the context of today. The short story format also contributes to the fatigue I started to feel while reading – switching focus every ten or fifteen pages without much to mark the transition from story to story since they all either end abruptly or are not really tied up easily becomes frustrating. Ironically, I wish I had only read a few of the stories rather than the whole collection so I could just appreciate their oddness as stand-alone pieces. That being said, if Bakic every puts out a novel, I’ll definitely pick it up as her unapologetic, bleak quirk does have a lot of potential.
I have also been reading essays from the Atavist magazine collected in the collection titled Love and Ruin. One was about a lonely whale, one about hippopotamus meat and 1920s grifters, one about a leper colony on Hawaii, one about a very fraught family history full of wartime secrets. I have a bunch more left that will probably be as varied in topics and styles. Consistently, these are well written essays, having a well-defined tone and they are all impeccably researched. I picked up the book to absorb some good writing more than to be enlightened by the content of the essays and it has so far delivered on the former and pleasantly surprised me on the latter.
WATCHING: Since my last letter I not only got fully hooked on Black Lighting but also managed to finish all the seasons of it that are available for streaming. Watching this show has been an interesting experience since it follows so many classic superhero beats and is often easy to predict, but it also features an almost exclusively black cast and grounds itself in African American experiences I don’t have. A few times I caught myself thinking that the show’s take on race was overly simplified and cartoonish and that the racist villains were just too racist. I then quickly pulled back my judgement since Black Lighting is a comic book show and the level of cartoonish villainy it displays is exactly what one would encounter in many comic books. In other words, while watching the Pierce family (Jefferson Pierce is Black Lighting) become fully vigilante-fied I was constantly aware of how their race made me want to judge the plot by a standard I may not have had for some other comic book adaptations. In my mind, this very much speaks to the importance of representation and though it does not excuse some of the more nonsensical plot points and leaps in storylines, it does make the show stronger. I would have loved Black Lighting when I was teenager, exactly because of the slightly contrived yet predictable story and all the slightly soapy family drama at its edges (case in point, I loved Dark Angel). It would have certainly influenced me positively to be rooting for superheroes that do not look like me. Black Lighting also does surprisingly well with portraying women, at least when it comes to the Pierce family. Black Lighting’s wife is an accomplished scientist, one of his daughters is a lesbian, a medical student and activist and the other is just a really smart and really bored teenager, the kind that can ace a calculus test then sneak out to get high on the roof. All of these women are fully three-dimensional characters (one even gets to womanize a little in the way a Bruce Wayne of past years might) and the two daughters in particular are given lots of agency. Moreover, when their agency is threatened this becomes one of the focal points of the plot and things quickly unravel when one of them is being told what to do. Moreover, Pierces are above everything supportive, respectful and loving towards each other and as such a more positive portrayal of family than most shows I’ve seen since Bob’s Burger. I believe the show is coming back for another season and though I don’t expect to be particularly blown away by its plot, I will certainly keep watching.
Having finished Black Lighting, I finally got around the second season of Mindhunter. I was expecting to be disappointed as this season did not seem to generate as much buzz as the first, but in reality, that should probably be blamed on how saturated with new content we are as TV watchers and not much else. Season two of Mindhunter picks up where season one left off and does not change much which makes for a consistently satisfying watching experience. The pacing is somewhat more uneven, especially since the second part of the season focuses on a single case outside of the FBI headquarters, and some details do not get the follow-up they might deserve (Holden’s anxiety, Wendy’s attempt to interview subjects). For me as a viewer, however, this season mostly served as proof that the show can keep going without sacrificing much of its original appeal. In other words, as long as there is more coming, I am fine with believing that everything will get tied up eventually. The main characters and cast in Mindhunter are compelling and interesting and I just didn’t mind spending time with them. As a possibly most amazing show of force by its creative team, Mindhunter does follow some conventions of a typical police procedural and draws ample parallels between the main characters’ private lives and the crimes they are investigating, but this trope is executed so well that its mild predictability does not hurt it. I really liked the pivot from Holden to Tench and found some of the scenes of him and his wife absolutely gut-wrenching, and Wendy (the still very cheek-bone-d Anna Torv) got to really shine when given a chance, especially in the interview scenes. And then there’s the whole BTK killer issue, almost a show-within-a-show at this point, which might potentially be the most striking parallel between what the protagonists are discovering about serial killer psychology and how a serial killer actually conducts themselves. The BTK segments peppered throughout the season are case studies as much as those explicitly debated by the FBI agents we follow, and though he will certainly cross their path more explicitly in the future, it is a really interesting choice to keep featuring his story as an almost independent storyline to underscore how often things don’t actually change and we fall back in the same bleak loops of behavior. On that note, the season does end with a fair amount of disappointment, bitterness and loss, which is possibly even more dark than the rather visceral fear that marked the season one finale. This leaves me to wonder how much longer it will be believable that our heroes can actually keep it together and not devolve into heinous villainy themselves. I do hope season three will happen for this show and explore this further.
I have also had a chance to watch all of Undone, Amazon’s first animated series. Unlike Netflix’s Bojack Horseman or Big Mouth, Undone is rotoscoped rather than drawn and reminded me of shows like Fleabag more than any of the quirky-yet-bleak animation that seems to have become the norm in recent years. Though the story at the center of the show is not terribly original (how often can I say that about everything and anything I watch?), I enjoyed this show very much, primarily due to how real its characters are and how refreshingly un-pretentious it is even when it tackles heavily existential themes. It does not do justice to Undone to say that it excels in matters of diversity and representation – this makes it sound like some exercise in politically correct character assembly and Undone is so much more human and warm than that. The main character, Alma, is part Mexican, part Jewish, and uses a cochlear implant, her partner is an Indian immigrant and her sister is marrying a WASP. They all look like people I work with, real people with complex and convoluted backgrounds. All of them also talk and joke, Alma and her partner Sam in particular, in the casually nihilistic way that I am very familiar with as a millennial, but that often comes off as contrived when imitated on the big and small screens. These are not only people that I have met before but also people I would be happy to hang out with, and I definitely saw some of me and my partner in Alma and Sam’s banter. The plot of Undone is a mix of Hamlet, magical realism and quantum physics nonsense about time travel. Undone is also a story about generational trauma, mental health, families, class, race and relationships. The former is a well-executed vehicle for the latter so the show both looks good and garners empathy and emotional buy-in from the viewer. It only has eight episodes which makes it both binge-able and a suitable week-long dinnertime viewing experience. The rotoscoping works surprisingly well in the context of both magical realism and possibly slightly losing one’s mind. In general, there is just not much wrong that this show can do. I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did but it might be one of the better things I have seen this year, a slightly hokey ending notwithstanding.
Finally, while spending time in New York before and after our wedding, we slipped into something like our school break mode and had a few late nights watching most of Netflix’s The Spy. I wish I had some deeply thought-through political take on this show, but mostly it fell flat for me even as just a piece of highly produced television. Certainly, a story centering an Israeli spy infiltrating 1960s Syria as a dashing playboy could use more explanations of the political context and a more critical take on both sides of the conflict. Mostly, though, The Spy suffers from being so visually lavish and clearly so in the vein of what we now call prestige television that its one-note characters, and lack of emotional development for almost all of them, quickly becomes inexcusable. In the abstract it is clear who the people inhabiting this show are: an over-eager pencil pusher wanting to prove himself, a loyal wife left alone with small children, a spy losing himself in a glamorous new identity, a supervisor carrying trauma from past failures… These are all familiar tropes recycled ad nauseam in spy fiction everywhere. However, The Spy does not develop them beyond the minimum necessary for the story, also at times hard to identify precise motivations for, to keep going. Sacha Baron Cohen is stunningly unrecognizable here and the whole thing looks amazing, but even the sepia-adjacent color scheme eventually started to bother me, reminding me of the lack of metaphorical color in the show more than invoking some sort of a vintage ambiance. The Spy begins by teasing Cohen’s characters downfall, then takes the viewer back in time. We didn’t manage to close this time-loop while we were together and upon coming back to Illinois, I decided I just didn’t care enough to catch-up on my own. That probably aptly summarizes how aggressively just-ok-I-guess this show is.
EATING: As is always the case when I travel, I ate like there is no tomorrow in New York, grabbing vegan croissants while running around Brooklyn with my mom and enjoying a big vegan Mexican meal when we brunch-ed with my now husband. At the lunch after our wedding the bibimbap was almost as great as the view of the whole city. And I discovered that pumpernickel everything bagels exist and pair well with vegan cream cheese, luckily on my last day in the city or otherwise I would have immediately developed a habit. At the same time, my stomach is still not quite right and none of the new medical tests I have had recently have been particularly conclusive so my eating at home has been much more simple and fairly restricted. I have been really partial to chocolate oatmeal topped with kiwi and peanut butter, learned to make a really good cumin rice that very much reminds me of Indian restaurants and in a moment of weakness attempted a layer cake for a small dinner party with friends. The recipe I am sharing here certainly falls into the category of being simple but also very much informed by my overly cautious, digestion-weary diet. These cornmeal and oat pancakes are quick to make, nicely savory and a great vehicle for spreads or sauces. If I were more brave I would have piled some stewed black beans and avocado on top of them but having them alongside some sautéed kale and chickpeas, ajvar and marinated roasted red peppers was great as well.
For 2-3 pancakes you will need
4-5 tablespoons fine yellow cornmeal
1 tablespoon rolled oats (or any flour you like)
1 teaspoon nutritional yeast (optional or substitute parmesan if you eat dairy)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground flaxseed
A very generous pinch of salt
5-6 tablespoons unsweetened almond milk (or other milk of choice)
2 teaspoons vegetable oil (or coconut oil or melted vegan or dairy butter)
1. In a medium-sized bowl stir all the dry ingredients. In a small cup mix the milk and the oil until well incorporated.
2. Mix the wet ingredients into dry until no streaks of cornmeal remain. The batter should be slightly thicker than average pancake batter so add more cornmeal if it seems necessary. Let sit for five to ten minutes.
3. Heat a non-stick pan or a cast iron skillet then add a bit of oil and wait until it starts to shimmer. At that point spoon a half or a third of your batter onto the pan and smooth into a pancake shape with the back of a spoon. The batter should rise slightly, curving and bubbling at the edges. Once the edges seem set (they will be darker in color), flip and cook for another minute or so on the other side. The pancake should be a bit crispy and golden. Repeat with remaining batter.
Tips: While these pancakes do rise, they are not as moist and fluffy as many pancakes are and have a chewier texture. I like this in a savory pancake but would definitely recommend mixing-in some pumpkin pure or applesauce if you prefer a softer pancake. I would start with about half a cup and adjust flour until a thick batter formed.
To make these sweet, leave out the nutritional yeast, use the tiniest bit of salt and add a tablespoon of either brown or coconut sugar or maple syrup. Serve with more syrup, sautéed apples or a berry compote.